Home For Sale (Only Slightly Used)

Tomorrow’s the day!

Tomorrow’s the day! We’re going to list our home for sale. We’ve been planning and thinking about our new home for months; however, I haven’t really thought much about moving from this house. This has been our home for almost 24 years. Our children grew up here. We’ve painted and remodeled rooms (some more than once) to made it our own. Now we’re going to hand the keys over to someone else who will probably paint and remodel to make it their own. Don’t get me wrong — I’m excited to start the next phase of our life; however, at the same time I can’t help feeling a little sad to leave this house.

We’ve known that we were going to move for several years; so much of the work we’ve done on the house was with selling in mind (adding wood floor in the master, pouring a new patio and front porch). During the last few months we’ve painted; put new carpet in two of the bedrooms and had the master bath completely redone. It’s felt like an HGTV Buying and Selling episode around here. I think Jonathan and Drew would be proud. We’ve spent money to make the house appealing to buyers. Hopefully, we will find out within a few months if the strategy actually works. If the house doesn’t sell, I may have to call the Scott brothers for advice. Check out this HGTV article for information about preparing your home for sale Which Home Improvements Pay Off.

Packing & More Packing

With much appreciated help from our daughter; we’ve had several marathon packing weekends. Most of the kitchen, the majority of my books and knick-knacks are already packed and in storage close to our new home (to be). It was difficult packing because we knew that it would be almost a year before we’d move in to the new house.

In addition, we’ll be living in our motorhome once this house sells. How do you decide what you need? The motorhome has its own kitchen supplies; so that wasn’t a problem. Packing up our clothing and shoes took some thought because we’ll need clothing for 2 different seasons. In our part of Texas, winters are sometimes rough and spring may feel like summer. We solved the problem by storing a small amount of spring/summer clothing at our son’s house. Deciding which crafting items to keep, which to take and which to pack was more difficult. I didn’t want to pack something that wouldn’t be useable a year later. For our motorhome stay, I limited myself to a plastic tote of painting supplies, a cloth brief case of scrapbooking supplies and a backpack of camera equipment. I think I came close to my goal of donating at least 1/3 of my crafting supplies to the Salvation Army family center. I also decided to donate many of my books instead of moving them to our new home. Getting rid of most of my book collection was really difficult for me. As a former, school librarian (and an avid reader) I had a large collection of books. However, our new home is an open floor design and will have fewer walls in the main living areas. I’ll still have a few bookcases; but many less than the 10 plus that I’ve had previously. Luckily a teacher friend of mine took many of the books and will distribute them to her students and parents of her students. I’m betting that as we unpack we’ll find other items that we really don’t need for this next stage of our life.

Our garage is still packed to the brim with boxes that we plan to move to storage by the end of the year. (This isn’t an actual picture of our garage; but it’s not far from how our garage looks at the moment.)

Staging

The last step was to stage our home to appeal to buyers. There’s an abundance of advice available online about staging your home or you can hire a professional stager. I took on the challenge and hope that the house will appeal to prospective buyers. I decluttered every room, packed away our personal photos; packed my elephant collection and put my hubby’s NASCAR memorabilia into storage. Hopefully, this will help buyers to see themselves living in the house.

What do you find hardest about moving? If you’ve moved recently, what advice would you give someone who’s preparing to move? Do you think staging a house before selling helps toward a quicker sale or better price?

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4 thoughts on “Home For Sale (Only Slightly Used)”

Linda, having spent every day of the last three months decluttering and professionally staging my home, I have to say it’s been the most physically grueling project I’ve ever undertaken. But, as I look at the house today, I can honestly say it’s picture perfect and move-in ready. And today it goes on the market land we have already have a showing at 10. There’s also a broker’s open from 10 – 1 and an Open house this Sunday. Today will be the first day in three months that I won’t be getting out of bed and tackling anything with the house! It will feel weird but wonderful 🙂

So, yes, I believe staging is imperative (especially in my area) and hiring a professional to help guide us through and to come in once we had decluttered to actually use our things to set the stage was well worth the money. She became as much my therapist as my stager 🙂

Stacy, Congrats on making it to the listing stage. I understand how difficult it is to get everything done. It’s a good sign that you already have a listing. 🙂 Good luck with the brokers open and your open house. Do you already have a new house picked out or are you building?